After seven years of planning, two years of construction, and a seven million dollar donation from one of the school’s most prominent trustees, the Parsons Making Center is now open. Despite its name, the brand new space is open to students from all levels and divisions of The New School, and according to University officials, reflects the administration’s ongoing initiative to unify the seven schools into one university.
The lack of community within the university has been recurring topic for some time now, a problem Joel Towers, dean of Parsons, addressed during the September 9th opening celebration for the Making Center, and one he hopes the new center will begin to solve.
“It’s less about the physical space and more about the community that will be built there,” Towers said.
The 25,000 square foot space, located in the basement, second and third floors of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, on the corner of 13th Street and 5th Avenue, opened August 29th, the first day of the fall semester. The center offers students across The New School a place to experiment with new technology, shop for project materials, host meetings with outside industry professionals and work side by side with both strangers and friends.
“Make it messy, seriously,” encouraged Towers, at its opening. “It is now that it will gain life!”
Students can take advantage of new 3D printing technologies, refurbished tool shops, textile equipment, updated printmaking facilities, a complete ceramics “wet lab,” an in-school material store and a projects room. The center is an addition to the 80,000 square feet of “satellite making facilities,” such as the wood shop on the fourth floor of 25 E. 15th St, spread throughout the school. The Making Center director, Will McHale, called it the “club house or central point of a lot of other resources that have existed here for a long time.”
The idea of a Making Center emerged seven years ago and in November 2013, Rice+Lipka Architects, a firm that has designed numerous spaces for the school in the past, was assigned the project. The design process and construction work followed during the next year and was completed this summer.
Most of the funds for the Making Center came from the $7 million donation from Parsons alumna, New School Trustee and fashion designer, Kay Unger. Unger graduated in 1968 and has been the creative head of several clothing brands, among them Kay Unger New York. After a visit to the construction site a year ago left Unger excited about what the Making Center could mean to the school, she knew she wanted to help fund the project. The formal announcement of her donation was made in February.
Along with her donation, Unger insisted the school stick to certain design principles that had already been in mind. The space had to be open, the printing facilities had to stick to sustainable principles, and everything had to be on wheels. The space is designed to be in constant change, because “static spaces don’t work,” Unger said.
There was also a $30,000 donation to the Making Center from LG Electronics Inc. in the form of 30 computer monitors. The school is hoping to create more partnerships and get more opportunities like this one in the future.
Despite these donations and the several years spent planning, the center is not one hundred percent completed. There are still some minor things to be finalized in the printmaking and ceramics area.
However, similar to Unger’s vision, the architects said the space was meant to be adaptable. “Some things might move, but the space accepts ongoing adjustments,” Lyn Rice, co-founder of Rice+Lipka Architects, said. He explained that during the center’s design process and construction, new ideas to add to the space kept popping up, so the project changed constantly.
“When I think of the Making Center today, the Making Center in one year, or two years… It’s not going to look the same, and that’s what’s exciting,” Rice said.
The material shop, meant to provide students with sustainable materials, while making their search to buy supplies easier, will be located on the third floor. The Making Center team is still programming and stocking the store and waiting for its furniture. McHale explained that they are short on staff, which has affected the opening of both the material shop and ceramics studios. He said they won’t be functioning adequately until they are “fully staffed.”
Aside from being home to a variety of new resources, machines, technologies and shops, the Making Center offers an abundance of open work space, designed to become a place for collective and collaborative use for students across all New School divisions.
“We want someone else’s leftover pieces from one project to be used by someone else’s collage, or work,” said Unger.
Creators envision the Making Center as a New School hub where students and faculty from all degree seeking areas will spend the most amount of their time working on projects.
McHale and Towers share similar visions about the Making Center. The idea is for the open space to promote the exchange of views and ideas among students across schools and to bring together projects from different disciplines, allowing students to visualize alternative ways of tackling the same issue through the eyes of their Making Center neighbors.
“A product design student might not think about using a sewing machine for their project, but it might actually be a genius idea,” Rice said.
“There’s so much more possibility if we’re not just sitting in our own world,” Towers said to Parsons faculty during the opening celebration.
In the past few years, The New School has made several changes in an effort to centralize all its divisions and concentrate them in one central “campus.” University Center was created to be an epicenter of The New School, Parsons School of Fashion has moved downtown from the Garment District to its new home on the Southwest corner of 13th St and Fifth Ave, Mannes has moved downtown from the Upper West Side to its new home in Arnold Hall and Drama, Jazz, and Mannes have unified as the New School of Performing Arts. The creation of the Making Center is the next step towards unification.
The Making Center is an attempt to completely change the way students think about education. Towers said, “having a Lang student next to a Fashion major [next to] someone from Design and Technology” is a future in which students won’t know any other way.
Photo by Julia Himmel.
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