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A new design center connects a creative campus.
The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center establishes a new 32,800-square-foot campus nexus for Parsons The New School for Design by uniting and radically reorganizing the street-level spaces of the school’s four buildings around a new urban quad. The center draws together the school’s creative programs in their active Greenwich Village context. New Fifth Avenue and West 13th Street entries connect internally for the first time under a glazed-roof, providing access to new galleries, archives, auditorium, orientation center, student critique zone, and seminar spaces.
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The new 1,600-square-foot glazed-roof campus quad unifies circulation and brings together students and faculty from the school’s different design disciplines. Yellow poplar bark panels refer to traditionally planned campus environs, but the new addition is urban and improvised 90 years after the buildings were completed, a tactical appropriation of the liminal space between existing buildings. Stripped to expose their substantial concrete and steel structures, the existing building shells provide a raw and varied industrial context for the new, discretely articulated programmatic insertions.
Lyn Rice Architects worked as designers and planners to set up opportunities for the students to create an identity for the center through their work. Windowsills that previously formed a barrier between inside and out were removed. New frames were lowered and thickened to form a window lounge with interior and exterior seating. The window lounge also doubles as an exhibition zone for the display of student work, and encourages students and faculty to occupy the complex’s perimeter.
Formal name of project: Sheila C. Johnson Design Center
Location:
Parsons The New School for Design
New York, New York
Gross square footage: 32,800 sq.ft.
Total construction cost: $19 million
Completion Date: June 2008
Owner:
The New School
Architect:
Lyn Rice Architects
40 Worth Street 1317
New York, NY 10013
T 212.285.1003
F 212.285.1005
www.lrany.com
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