The New School (April 4) -- “On West Twelfth Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, you will see a new and peculiar looking building, if the snowstorm permits. Its nature and purpose will be a trifle difficult to guess at first, for no structure of the sort will ever have met your eye before. But if your gaze strays down far enough, you will perceive that it is the new home of the New School for Social Research.” Along with Floyd Rowe Datson, a University of Illinois professor of experimental physics, and New York engineer T.F. Bludworth, Urban devised an ingenious solution. The three designed a plaster ceiling in the form of a grill, with perforations that kept sound waves from bouncing back into the space from the ceiling.
A Building With Personality
4/5/2019