The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center unites at street level several historic buildings at Fifth Avenue and 13th Street dating from the early 1900s, which the university has occupied since the early 1970s. Previously a series of small, disconnected spaces, the center creates an open and welcoming campus center filled with natural light and strong connections to the surrounding city. Honored with a 2007 Merit Award for Architectural Design from the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the center's design preserves and enhances the architecture of the existing buildings, while underscoring The New School's commitment to the new.

By opening up the existing spaces, the architects created a double-height, skylight-covered public space or “urban quadrangle” out of aluminum, glass, and raw concrete, which connects the center's main spaces. A series of deep-framed bay windows provide a visual relationship to the street, as well as seating and display areas for student work. In the prominent corner space, a pivoting wall opens to define a student critique area with pin-up surfaces and two large sliding monitors, placing the design process on view to passersby on the street. The quad also is enlivened by super-sized graphics of student work, which wrap two of the elevator banks. These displays will change periodically to highlight the range of disciplines taught at Parsons. In addition, poplar bark covers the east wall of the quad, while expanded aluminum mesh encases a new passenger elevator.

Among the center's amenities are the state-of-the-art, 3,200-square-foot Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, a museum-quality exhibition space that is designed as a box within a box visible from 13th Street. This highly refined space set within the raw structure conceals audio-visual technology, ductwork, pipes, and conduit, which are accessed via slots cut into the floor and ceiling. The 89-seat Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Auditorium is conceived as a bamboo shell that features a sound-absorptive, graphically treated rear wall and a slate-covered front wall that functions as a giant blackboard.

The renovated Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries have been reconfigured to create a more open and flexible space by increasing the size of the galleries, simplifying their configuration, and incorporating movable display walls. The Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Archives Center provides 900 square feet for the storage and study of the archive collections. A series of suspended, UV-protected fluorescent fixtures provide an intimate scale to the double-height space, while a continuous perimeter of felt creates an acoustically quiet zone for scholarly research. Other spaces include a bamboo-paneled orientation center for presentations to prospective students; a double-height, glazed meeting room carved out of a niche adjacent to the Kellen Gallery; and a cantilevered, mezzanine-level meeting pod that overlooks the quad.

Architectural Photography