Strange But True History
The spaceship of knowledge
WE TAKE 66 West 12th Street for granted: the space-age courtyard, the art-deco entrance to Tishman Auditorium, the curvy marble floors. It almost seems a classical monument. But one cannot overestimate the shocking effect the New School’s main building had on the city’s intellectual consciousness on opening day in 1930.
In 1930, amid the row of 19th-century townhouses still surrounding it today, 66 rose like a spaceship-like beacon of new ways of thinking, proclaiming to the world a new educational philosophy based on new neural pathways between the disciplines.
This was a New York still mostly devoid of modernist buildings. In Spring 1928, New School founder Alvin Johnson — tired of walking all the way to the old building way over at 465 West 23rd — wanted the new building near a major subway intersection. However, the New School had no money, even in a city where real estate was readily available. So, Johnson despatched himself to the 66 West 12th Street brownstone of Daniel Cranford Smith, a partly retired businessman who had been a loyal New School student and benefactor.
Johnson proposed that in exchange for Cranford-Smith donating the New School his townhouse (and, incidentally, the two vacant townhouses Cranford-Smith had purchased on both sides, simply to shield himself from any noisy neighbors), where the New School would build a new building, Cranford-Smith would get an apartment in the penthouse.
To Johnson’s surprise, Cranford-Smith bought the deal.
Johnson wanted a new style of building, which would integrate a library and social center that were merged, classrooms that integrated the latest in 1930s media technology (and even, in the ultimate expression of ultracommunity, an apartment for the student, Cranford Smith)—in a metallic spaceship-like tower that would say to the world, “we are new and on message!” In essence, as it proclaims to do today, The New School considered its building a form of media. (“I dwelt on the imperative need of a building that should express the ideals of the school, give visible form to its personality,” Johnson wrote in his autobiography, Pioneer’s Progress.)
Johnson convinced legendary functionalist architect Joseph Urban to do the job for a six percent commission — about half the going rate at the time. Normally architects’ fees were paid upfront, but the New School had no endowment, so Johnson asked Urban to take the job on promise of future fundraising. Over a table at the Plaza Hotel, Urban accepted in less than a minute.
66 was completely different from London Terrace, the neoclassical pile that the New School was vacating at 465 West 23rd and which had the feel of a dowdy English inn.
In 1930, The New School printed on linen a book for the new building. With no credited author but presumably drafted by Urban, the manifesto proclaims that the New School seeks nothing less than to “modify the educational machinery… and adapt it to new requirements.”
Urban’s concept of a school as a complex machine for mediation—although it draws from the Bauhaus—was nonetheless entirely new. The New School’s new “machine” aimed not merely to be a design school, but to combine the sciences, liberal arts and arts in one fluid and everchanging apparatus. Urban and Johnson’s vision surely shocked previous academicians who expected halls of classrooms; the building’s floorplans appeared as if pulverized in an Osterizer Blender. In a pre-preface to IDEO’s recent plans for 65 Fifth Avenue, a dance studio opened onto an academic hall, numerous auditoria opened on each other, and in an early vision of an internet, Urban designed a special new bibliographical service that kept media all over the building.
Of particular note were the fourth and fifth floors of 66, containing, as they did originally, a library and student center. This was not the closed-stack, dusty library of other schools: stacks were open, and they were designed in a space-age style of mahogany and bakelite. Urban designed the library such that the circulation desk was a stairway; part of the stacks, and the stairway to the student center were all part of a Metropolis-esque ziggurat meant to unify the various stages of learning in a great whirl of media. Urban built a round choral stand for the Tishman Auditorium stage in a matching art-deco style.
The New School prides itself, as President Bob Kerrey said in his 2007 Convocation Address in that same Tishman Auditorium, “on being a place where individuals can learn and develop without rigid rules or superfluous conventions that limit human potential” –- where, as he noted in 2008, scholars do their best thinking “in the moment after they realize they were wrong.” The 66 building speaks both from our past and to our future.
Peter Ian Cummings (2008)