What do these two buildings have in common? Not much, except that they're both the soon to be built "signature building" of The New School! The one on the top is a few years old. The one below, unveiled yesterday, has been cut down to size by limited resources, zoning laws and neighborhood pushback. (But does it have to be brown? The surface is to be "pre-patinated brass" and evocative of the façade of the school's first building on 12th Street, but the model at least reminds one of wood shingled houses in mid-century suburbs.) The main point of continuity is the visibility of movement between floors, but compressed and squashed into the brown as it is here, Nicolai Ourousoff's observation is hard to resist: it looks like an "ant farm."
