The School of Constructed Environments challenges students to grapple with the forces shaping the world today: shifts in global and local ecological flows, changes in living patterns, growing economic disparities, excessive consumption, and increasing ethnic diversity. Interior, lighting, and product design and architecture students work with faculty and citizens of global communities to learn the skills of design engagement, integrated thinking, and urban practice in a collective effort to transform our cities into sustainable urban habitats, products, interiors, and buildings.
The Parsons Table, produced in the interior design department in the 1930s, is an apt metaphor for the School of Constructed Environments (SCE)—both as a physical home and as a community of scholars. Frequently cited as one of the most progressive and egalitarian objects in modern material culture, it represents the ongoing focus of the school on progressive, interdisciplinary inquiry.
The school encourages students to take advantage of all of the resources at Parsons and The New School, to interact with others working in SCE's 13,000-square-foot studio, and to form new alliances in the on-site facilities that include fabrication shops, computing labs, the ceramics studio, the Light Lab, and the Angelo Donghia Materials Center.
The school's 200 dedicated faculty believe socially aware innovation is created between and beyond disciplinary boundaries. Every SCE program exposes students to the cultural, environmental, and technological forces that are transforming human habitats so that they can design a more intelligent, sustainable world.
Vitra Exhibition
Growing Urban Habitats
Allan Wexler Awarded the Henry J. Leir Prize
Renfro/Zhang