Cooper Schilling, AIA
With over eighteen years of experience, Cooper Schilling is a seasoned designer, project architect and manager. He has worked both across the nation and abroad on a wide variety of projects ranging from commercial spaces to institutions of higher learning to historic buildings requiring restoration and preservation. These experiences have made Cooper comfortable with leading a project’s design and technical efforts while also balancing the responsibilities of project supervision and team collaboration. These skills have in turn led him to become a leader within the firm’s Detail and Systems Review Group. As a senior staff member, Cooper not only provides project teams with guidance based on his technical design, building systems, and construction experience, but also serves as a mentor to the firm’s younger staff architects and designers.

Cooper is currently a senior project architect for 181 Mercer, a new multipurpose building commissioned by New York University and designed to be a gateway from the university to the surrounding city. The 735,000-square-foot building is scheduled for completion in 2021 and will house classrooms, informal study spaces, performing arts theaters, varsity and recreational sports facilities, a café, and faculty and first-year student housing.

Prior to his work on 181 Mercer, Cooper worked on KieranTimberlake’s now-completed Consortium for Building Energy Innovation Building 661. The project, which was a combination of one new building and the renovation of another, saw a two-story brick masonry building in Philadelphia’s historic Navy Yard transformed from a dilapidated recreation facility into an open and collaborative workspace that demonstrates the research, development, deployment, and analysis of current and emerging sustainable building technologies. Cooper also contributed to leading the renovation of Harvard University’s Dunster House, a 165,000-square-foot undergraduate student residence that is part of the university’s group of historic neo-Georgian River Houses. Faced with the need to modernize a student residence steeped in both historic and cultural character, Cooper and his team restored the house’s historic interior, including its dining hall, library, and Master’s House, while making energy efficiency enhancements and replacement of the 875 windows and restoration of its 57 chimneys. Additionally, the project team added a fitness center, an additional student cafe, music and art rooms, and lounges and common spaces.

A registered architect in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, as well as a LEED-accredited professional BD+C, Cooper earned his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Syracuse University and his Master of Architecture degree with distinction from the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. Before joining KieranTimberlake in 2012, he worked at architecture offices in New York, Dubai, Philadelphia, Austin, and Washington, D.C.