Teamwork in Tepper

Collaboration is one of the keys to success at Carnegie Mellon. And a collaboration between husband and wife team Doug Cooper and Stefani Danes, both professors of architecture, illustrates that perfectly. Dedicated in 2019, a mural in the Tepper Building titled “The Collaborative Campus” depicts scenes and people from CMU in fabric and charcoal drawings, the favorite mediums of Danes and Cooper.

“We took the idea of place as the setting for collaboration but stretched that idea across campus and suggested some surprising ways in which you sometimes find collaboration where you don’t expect it,” Danes said.

The first of the mural’s four main panels is set in the College of Fine Arts, where Herb Simon and Allen Newell are engaged in a game of chess as a way of exploring the cognitive strategies of expert players. In the background, statues sport augmented reality headsets while the award-winning rescue robot CHIMP crawls up the steps. And it’s not just academic collaborations that are depicted. Maintenance workers and food preparers also can be found in the mural. A repeating motif in the mural resembles a connected line of dancers, an abstract take on neurons in cells and the synapses that connect and communicate information. From networking to NREC to Tartan traditions to a performance of “The Magic Flute” in the Gates Building atrium, the mural overflows with imaginative ways to connect.