The project for New York University’s Department of English is the complete renovation of an 8-story building near Washington Square Park. 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. Custom cut and bent expanded metal ceiling panels utilize an off the shelf material to create a unique and accessible ceiling system. Each of the 445 unique panels is tagged with an ID number which corresponds to its place on a layout plan. The ID number also contains instructions for the fabricator, such as direction of bends and length of segments. The constraint of very narrow floor plates was opportunistically used to create unique conditions along the hallways, with a design strategy to make an irregular public passage lined by offices along the perimeter windows. Occasional shared spaces transform floors in distinct ways throughout the building.
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