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

Doug 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 in 1992. Now at Pittsburgh's Heinz History Center, the mural was completed in collaboration with Vintage, a Pittsburgh senior center. In 1994, he completed another mural with the elderly for the Philadelphia Courthouse. His 200 foot-long mural in Carnegie Mellon’s Jared L. Cohon 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, Doug has used mural projects as vehicles for foreign language instruction. In 1996, assisted by CMU students, a German professor and elderly residents of Frankfurt, Doug created a nine-by-six meter-long mural for Frankfurt’s central market. He used a similar process in creating an approximately 70 meter-long mural for a lecture hall at the University of Rome (2005).

Doug’s 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 the corporate headquarters of 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. He collaborated with photographers to create a multi-layered mural combining drawing and photography at Carnegie Mellon’s facility in Doha, Qatar (2009). He worked with fabric artist and faculty colleague 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).

Doug’s drawings have been shown in one-artist exhibitions at local, national and international art centers including Concept Gallery (Pittsburgh, PA), the Carnegie Museum of Art (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. His series of paintings focusing on Forbes Field, the former home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, will be shown at Pittsburgh’s Concept Gallery in February 2025.

Doug 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 drawing the city of Pittsburgh. Knowing and Seeing (University of Pittsburgh, 2019) addresses the intellectual foundation of his approach to drawing the urban landscape.
 

Pinburgh

A short fantasy set into panoramic Pittsburgh industrial landscapes drawn by muralist Doug Cooper. The film features CMU School of Drama's PigPen Theatre as actors and as creators of the score: Ryan Melia, Arya Shahi, Ben Ferguson and Dan Weschler. Ryan Woodring led post production. 3D modeling by Shawn Cencer and Greg Tanski. Green screen filming done at Pittsburgh Filmmakers by Gretchen Neidert and Matthew Day.

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 to 1970. The video features vignettes about Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell and Bill Mazeroski.

NEWS

February 15, 2025: Professor Doug Cooper’s show, “Forbes Field and Other Remembered Places,” is on view at Pittsburgh’s Concept Art Gallery. The show, featuring Cooper’s signature large-format vignettes of the city’s architectural places and this video about the years he lived across from Forbes Field in Oakland, opens with a reception with Cooper on Saturday, February 15 from 1-4pm and runs through Saturday, March 29, 2025.