Even if you were Van Day Truex, the year was 1952 and you had just resigned as president of the Parsons School of Design to take a shot at a private life, you will still be stunned by the enormity of such carte blanche. Imagine its happening twice in a lifetime.

Van Day Truex was a Parsons Alum, and later became the Professor of Interior Design. He was on the administration at Parsons for over thirty years. You can read more about him here.

Stanley Barrows was a longtime, influential interior design professor at Parsons for many years.

If you’d like to write a more in-depth profile of Stanley Barrows, email us at archivist@newschool.edu. We welcome contributions.

Jean McClintock Gardner is a longtime Parsons urban environment faculty member. You can read more about her here.

A bare table—or wall-makes Stanley Barrows very nervous. In nearly 79 years of living, he has collected 4,000 books, 45 framed paintings and engravings, 60 pieces of porcelain, and in various sinuous positions of sniffing and leaping, a dozen small bronze whippets and greyhounds.

The Temple bell stops
But the sound keeps coming out of the flowers

– Basho

“I had always seen architecture as landscaping.”

– Michael Kalil, “Seed Vision” interview, 1990

In archival terms, this assemblage of objects is known as “realia”- ie. three-dimensional objects (man-made or naturally occurring) such as coins, tools, and textiles and anything else that cannot be described as a document.

“We dream faster than we can build and we build faster than we accept. We therefore invent the notion of the future until we accept what we have built.” -MK

There’s nothing less utopian and avant-garde than the New York City loft. A symbol of gentrification in Manhattan and Brooklyn, teeming with tech-bros and slumming Wall Street workers, when you see loft construction you can be sure that the artisanal mayonnaise shop won’t be far behind.

The Parsons table is not a physical object but an idea, the platonic ideal of a table, characterized by a simple form, unadorned, adaptable to any material, with legs as wide as the tabletop is deep.