Kevin Bone was a professor of architecture at the Cooper Union from 1983 until 2018, teaching design, building technology, and sustainability. He taught at all primary levels of the design studio sequence including Architectonics, Design II, Design III, and the Urban Architecture studios of Design IV. From 1990 until 1999 Bone taught the Building Technology class, developing for the class a syllabus based on the study of New York City’s unique and remarkable building culture. The work of those classes led to two publications, The New York Waterfront, Evolution and Building Culture of the Port and Harbor (Monacelli Press, 1997) and Waterworks, The Architecture and Engineering of the New York City Water Supply (Monacelli Press, 2004).
For over twenty years Bone worked to integrate issues of environment into the curriculum at Cooper both in the studio and classrooms in the school of Architecture and as the founding director of Cooper Union’s Institute for Sustainable Design, where for seven years he developed the Institute’s agenda, organizing academic programming on issues of environment and sustainability. Bone and his CU colleagues at the Institute published and exhibited on topics ranging from environmental design in architecture to infrastructure, energy, and landscape. Primary among those publications are: Lessons from Modernism, Environmental Design in Architecture, 1925-1975 (Monacelli Press, 2014) and Landscapes of Extraction, the Collateral Damage of the Fossil Fuel Industries, published by the Cooper Union in 2011.
Bone is currently working with the Wright-Ingraham Institute, a non-profit, private educational entity established in Colorado in 1970 to address concerns of environment and the wise use of natural resources. Bone is leading the Institute’s development of a new generation of interdisciplinary, integrative, field-based, educational programming focusing on questions of land and resource use and sustainability. The programming is tuition-free and open to advanced students across a wide range of disciplines and nationalities. The 2019 program was based in Colombia, South America.
Bone is also a principal of the New York City-based office of Bone/Levine Architects. For over thirty-six years this practice has pursued a mix of contemporary architectural design, technical consulting, and historic preservation. The practice has won numerous awards, including many AIA awards, the Chicago Athenaeum Prize for American Architecture, and the New York City Municipal Arts Society Master of Preservation Award.