"Zuccotti Park is a 33,000-square-foot urban open space across from the World Trade Center site. Cooper, Robertson & Partners reinterpreted the thin, rectangular plaza by breaking from the surrounding orthogonal grid and setting the park on a diagonal axis, emphasizing it as a link between the World Trade Center and Lower Manhattan’s Financial District. Twenty-four granite benches and 53 honey locust trees create diagonal paths across the park, anchored at opposite corners by a large London plane tree and a bright red, 70-foot steel sculpture by Mark di Suvero. To mediate an 11-foot grade change, curved granite steps taper and disappear into the sidewalk, rising up to Broadway at the northeast corner, and falling down to Trinity Place at the southwest."                        Full article

"With construction starting as early as next year -- and funding questions finally answered -- a new signature park for downtown Miami, a Museum Park, was unveiled Thursday evening to a glowing reception.

''It's almost like a miracle to sit here and hear one positive thing after another from a lot of people who were not positive in the beginning,'' Miami activist Kay Hancock Apfel announced during the event's question-and-answer session. ''This, to me, is evidence that this process is working,'' Alexander Cooper, one of the company's partners, said of the give-and-take."

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The 50-plus entires were reviewed by a three-member jury - Ross Anderson, FAIA, Richard Gluckman, FAIA, and Jury Chair Jaquelin Taylor Robertson, FAIA. The winning projects were residential and commercial, and mostly modernist in style. "Awards programs are done in the AIA all the time," Robertson says. "This is the first time, however, we've had the awards for the Peconic Chapter because it has just been created within the last two years. That's why I agreed to do it, because I've spent a lot of time in East Hampton."

Both the WindMark Beach and WaterSound Beach Showhomes were featured in the special section.

What the Award Jury said about Zuccotti Park:
"We thought the lit pavement was quite wonderful. It pays a very quiet and deferential homage to the World Trade Center site without making a big issue of it being a memorial, and that is very touching. "

"Throughout a long career that has spanned the spectrum from upscale residences to comprehensive master plans, producing buildings here and abroad, Robertson has retained a strong sense of tradition. This spring, in honor of these and many other achievements, the University of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture named Robertson winner of the 2007 Richard H. Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture. Robertson joins a pantheon of previous laureates: Leon Krier, Demetri Porphyrios, Quinlan Terry, and Allan Greenberg.

"You wrote the forward for the book Houses of the Hamptons: 1880-1930. Why did you get involved in this project?"
"I agreed to do it because the book doesn't talk about houses as if they are disembodied things without people living in them. It's a social history as well as an architectural examination."
"What architects from this area have influenced your work?"
"My own work has been influenced by the smaller cottages built here for 250 years. The key to each place architecturally is that buildings should reflect the climate, culture, social standards, and material of the region."
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“At the meeting, Alex Cooper of Cooper, Robertson in New York showed off the master plan, which added manmade islands to the slip, providing spaces for a restaurant and pavilion and put the two museums on an 18-foot-high rise on the northern end of the park.”

"Looking at the new School of Education building from either Wentworth or St. Philip streets, it resembles a large new wood-frame house built next to the yellow brick house built on the corner about a century ago. That's a neat trick considering the new school has about 24,000 square feet, or 10 times as much as the average house today.

Jaquelin Robertson of Cooper Robertson & Partners designed it with help from Watson Tate Savory of Columbia. Robertson is no stranger to Charleston. The Virginia native has long been a confidant of Mayor Joe Riley, and Robertson's hand can be found in some of the city's most significant new developments, including the judicial center, the visitors center complex, and Waterfront Park."  Full article

Since 2001, those who create classical architecture, have had their own “Oscar.” The Richard Driehaus prize, which is awarded at the same time as the Pritzker prize, comes with $100,000 cash. This year the prize went to Jaquelin Robertson for his contribution to urban planning and for “bringing human values into land-use planning.”

“It was a beautiful house. On that everyone agreed. “It’s my tribute to the history of architecture on eastern Long Island,” says its architect, Jaquelin T. Robertson, of Cooper, Robertson & Partners, and the house with the gambrel roof in East Hampton won several awards. Nearly 20 years after it was built, the owners - Marshall Rose and Candice Bergen – asked him to make some substantial changes. “It was a beautifully thought-out house,” [Bergen] says, “and it was a delicate challenge to respect its history but reinterpret it as ours.” With Robertson’s help, the now year-round cottage maintains its structural integrity and essential character.”

"Sarasota believes in hiring the very best consultants available, and it usually shows. Monday the city commission voted to push to completion a 5-years-in-the-making Cooper, Robertson & Partners master plan for four blocks along the midtown bayfront. The new plan stretches for 42 waterfront acres between Boulevard of the Arts northward to Centennial Park just beyond 10th Street.

Among the other changes in the new plan presented by architect and urban designer Randall Morton of Cooper, Robertson are "transforming 30 acres of asphalt into 21 acres of parks and an oasis." Morton said the project "is as much a park plan as a building plan." For example, it will increase the amount of public park in the area from six to 21 acres.
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"Our coastal showhouse, with. architecture by John Kirk, celebrates the simplicity of Florida's quaint seaside escapes."

"Stylistically, the challenge of creating new architecture within the traditional context is in 'playing with the genes,' Robertson said. .The lessons of East Hampton, and of the Country Club Plaza section of Kansas City, Missouri, which Robertson called 'the most sophisticated shopping center in the United States ,' were applied when he took on the planning at Celebration."

"A key task was 'to figure out how to handle the extraordinary movement of people through the site,' Mr. Ottaiano. (. project manager for Cooper, Robertson & Partners, the firm that designed the park). said. A central corridor will keep foot traffic away from the more contemplative areas of the park."

"...The New York urban design firm Cooper, Robertson & Partners offered potential solutions, including digging a tunnel under the Charles for MBTA and Harvard shuttle buses, erecting a new bridge, and adding pedestrian walkways and retail kiosks on the Larz Anderson Bridge to make the trip enticing..."

" With the cooperation of their clients, Cooper, Robertson lowered the courthouse's height so that it no longer competed with nearby church steeples. The facades on King and Broad Street were redesigned to mend former breaches in the streetscape. The Broad Street façade was then given an overhanging sidewalk portico, a somewhat unusual architectural feature traditional to historic Charleston and a welcome enhancement to the townscape. It was a handsome though curious building. Curious, because of its many faces, knit into the cracks of the urban context, a structure unable to be seen as a whole, an edifice of parts, with each part befitting its different setting.. a socially responsible building, an architecture that healed."

"The city's department of transportation agreed that lighting would have to be updated, but they wanted a replacement with a fixture and light source that could easily be maintained. That's where Alex Cooper, and the rest of the designers at Cooper, Robertson, came in. They began looking at a new source of light, that until then, was used mainly in Europe ... Not only did Cooper want to do a completely new design, he wanted to draw special attention to Broadway with the placement of extra lighting. Known as the Canyon of Heroes, the street has played host to all 176 tickertape parades in the city's history. An idea evolved to have light poles 'marching up the street' every 40 to 50 feet on center."

" [Jaque] Robertson, principal in charge, and project architect John R. Kirk designed the house around the programmatic specifications of a young family. When those requirements suddenly changed during design development, the house became emblematic of the family's altered course, and thus unbuildable in the mind of the client...'Houses today must accommodate big programs and big desires,' says Kirk. 'It's important to control the machine: to allow for all the modern functional imperatives while eliminating any bloat that compromises the beauty of traditional architecture.' "

"For a commission in the Dominican Republic, [Jaque] Robertson started his tale by inducting visitors through a series of spatial locks, taking them from one world into another, down the rabbit hole into an entirely different state...At Casa de Campo, Robertson was an unapologetic traditionalist, and in this sprawling, 19,000-square-foot house, he has reinterpreted classicism, adapting it to the materials and skills available and to the ethos of the island - or what he calls 'the architectural gene bank of the Caribbean' which includes, historically, English enclaves from Barbados to Charleston."

"To turn a character-filled, vintage house into a livable home, you want to preserve old memories and reinvigorate them. In the 2004 Southern Accents Showhouse at WaterSound Beach, Florida, thoughtful design and careful craftsmanship have made a new house feel rooted in memory. The location, behind a 35-foot dune on one of the most beautiful stretches of beach in North America, implied an obligation. 'This is a place you go to be outside,' says [John] Kirk. The house was conceived with the idea 'that it would be filled with families - people of all ages who have come to the beach to be together,' says the architect. 'So the free flow of the spaces inside and out - the openness of the house - was intentional and essential.'"

"Designed by the New York firm of Cooper, Robertson & Partners, the lamps are part of a smart collection of street fixtures commissioned by the Alliance for Downtown New York, the most creatively alert of the city's business improvement districts. Sign and traffic light poles, trash cans, bicycle stands, pavements, and security bollards fill out the streetscape package. Though the program was begun before 9/11, its spartan design aesthetic suits downtown's sober mood. The entire city could take a lesson from this exercise in visual restraint...Some ticker tape, then, is in order for this morning's ribbon-cutting ceremony in honor of the Streetscape program. The Alliance for Downtown New York has broken the mold, if not, as yet, the retro spell. This is a very big deal. A round of cheers for the group's design team."

"'This project, more than any other, is the single best investment in our future that this city can make,' Deputy Mayor Daniel L. Doctoroff told a planning conference at Baruch College last month. He was not talking about the World Trade Center site. Instead, he was talking about the far West Side, where the Bloomberg administration envisions some 28 million square feet of commercial development and 12 million square feet of residential development by mid-century...Zoning details are evolving. 'We have all the ingredients, but I don't know what the bouillabaisse is going to be yet,' said Alexander Cooper."

"Necessitated by a $750 million expansion that has closed the museum's complex on West 53rd Street in Manhattan, MoMA QNS is an intriguing hybrid: a temporary venue for exhibitions and a permanent storage facility for an expanding art collection. [Scott] Newman was the one who first imagined MoMA in Queens, an idea that sounded crazy just a few years ago. Charged with developing a master plan for the museum's facilities, he recommended buying an old Swingline staple factory on 33rd Street off Queens Boulevard...'When it was first suggested, I couldn't think of one reason to move to Queens,' admits Ronald Lauder, the chairman of MoMA's board of trustees. 'Now I can't think of a better place to be.'"