The building houses faculty offices and administrative spaces for the department, as well as some shared meeting spaces. The first floor of the building is visually open to the street and provides a significant new space for departmental events. This new event space has a custom designed ceiling of expanded metal panels; their ephemeral effect is to lightly mask the existing infrastructure while accommodating lights in a pattern that flows across the space. Felt surfaces and an emphasis on shared light create continuity throughout the floors. The walls of faculty offices are translucent glass along the circulation spaces in order to share light from the perimeter to the interiors. Book shelves located behind the glass creates a pattern of faculty book collections seen in silhouette from the public spaces.

The objective of this project is to provide upgraded facilities for Princeton’s Field Hockey athletic field, team rooms, and public spaces. This project adds to the existing athletic complex at Princeton, integrating new facilities into a landscape of high performance playing fields. The scope of work includes: new team rooms for field hockey and lacrosse teams with space for trainers, team meetings and video reviews; the renovation of existing team rooms; the development of a new entry court with new finishes, donor recognition and ceremonial signage; an enlarged press box to service the new field; and the coordination of a new 1,500 seat grandstand.

This 32,000sf renovation will play host to two schools with distinct cultures and operations. Primary objectives for the new space are to support opportunities for mutual engagement, collaboration and the sharing of resources. It is also a priority for this project to explore new concepts for the organization of departmental space. The design proposes new typologies of working environments for NSPE. Private offices are organized on the interior of each floor with direct access to open areas around the perimeter that are reserved for shared workspaces, collaborative group work and informal social spaces. Flexibility is built into the open areas, which may be rearranged over time with changes in use. A strong organizational concept characterizes each floor while distinctive neighborhoods with distinguishing architectural characteristics support a diverse range of NSPE activity from formal presentations to ad-hoc production.

Central to the project is also the need to satisfy the complex programmatic requirements of each school while providing a unifying character and identity for NSPE. To counteract the density of program, the ceiling ties in the entire space through a pattern of openings that defines areas where higher, open ceilings were possible and that allows for required access to the mechanical systems.

This study looked at over 350,000 gross square feet of building stock currently occupied by Parsons students, faculty, and administration. Marble Fairbanks examined the existing space usage in the form of building models and metrics culled from the programming of previous semesters, faculty office designations, projected growth calculations, and many other data sources. Focus groups targeting specific topics including classroom organization, school-based hubs, faculty work spaces, and the consolidation of the shop spaces into a communal “Making Center” were held to solicit the input of the various stakeholders in the project. The existing buildings were also examined to determine their “highest and best uses” in their current configurations. Finally, these studies led to a proposed distribution of program across Parson’s existing building stock and scenarios for phased implementation of two specific floors.

Included in the project are spaces for the Journalism Library, the offices of the Columbia Journalism Review, assorted faculty and administrative offices, and classroom space. Central to the proposal is the introduction of several new spaces to serve as a social and intellectual center for the School: a multipurpose social hub for student-faculty interaction as well as larger meetings with visitors to the school, and a more informal student lounge space and cafe.

The social hub accommodates a diverse range of programs: study space for students in between classes, meeting space for students and faculty, informal presentation space for visitors from the journalism industry, and other such communal event spaces for the Journalism School. The cafe is intended to be a louder, more informal space for the School’s students, complete with plasma screens and LED signage that will broadcast the news to patrons. Its site at the formerly outdoor space between Journalism and Furnald allows it to engage the campus environment while also remaining within the School of Journalism. A transparent glass structure is proposed to give the School a more active presence on its entry plaza.