SCUP/AIA-CAE Excellence in Architecture Renovation or Adaptive Reuse, Honor Award

Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at The New School, New York, NY and
Lyn Rice Architects, New York, NY

Photo by Richard Barnes

Photos by Michael Moran

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This project establishes a new campus nexus for Parsons The New School for Design by uniting and comprehensively re-organizing the street-level spaces of the school’s four buildings around a new urban quad. Goals are to create an active institutional identity that reflects Parsons’ commitment to the new, recognize the school’s urban context, and highlight the innovative work being produced there. 

The project presented the opportunity to create a new social-academic space where students and faculty from diverse disciplines can meet, socialize, collaborate, study, draw, think, learn, and laugh together - to shape a common campus sensibility from four separate buildings. 

The planning process was inclusive, collaborative, and brought diverse project stakeholders together. The university worked effectively with the designers to make high-minded decisions focusing on design excellence and the long-term. The design team presented multiple ways to address issues during meetings and the group selected the best aspects of each option together. Then the designers synthesized these aspects into a cohesive architectural project. 

The design team worked as architects and as planners setting up opportunities for students to create an identity for the center through their work. The team resisted representing design through formal maneuvers at the facade, and instead used retail tactics to develop infrastructural solutions to display academic work. 

The materials palette included aluminum and hard-troweled concrete flooring, perforated bamboo, through-color mdf, color conversion varnish millwork, yellow poplar bark, powder-coated aluminum panels, felt panels, aluminum expanded metal mesh, honeycomb polycarbonate panels and more. It binds the programs together, and creates different moods and character, unique to each space. 

The gallery space completely opens to the street admitting diffuse north light and exposing the gallery section to the street. 

The Parsons buildings were not master-planned, but joined in an adhoc way with tenuous circulation links routed through a labyrinth of maintenance functions. 

The new Urban Quad unclogs the geographic center of the complex, unifies circulation, and provides a generous, daylit academic/social surface bringing students and faculty together.

The team worked opportunistically, seeking out forgotten or underutilized spaces that could be transformed into usable meeting, seminar, critique, and utility functions.

The buildings had been visually cut off from the urban context, but now the project visually opens all 300 linear feet of its perimeter to the street life. Indoor/outdoor window seats – a window lounge – connects the Greenwich Village community with Parsons’ students. 

The jury said, “ . . . very sophisticated adaptive reuse . . . a real mirroring of the art school and activity with the urban life of the city . . .”

Project Team: Parsons The New School for Design/The New School and Lyn Rice Architects with Buro Happold; Front, Inc.; Richard Shaver Architectural Lighting; Cerami; Construction Specifications; JAM Consultants, Inc. and Van Deusen & Associates