In 1919, the New School found its first home in Chelsea, around the corner from the offices of the New Republic, a convenience given that its editor Herbert Croly served as one of the main instigators of the school. Several converted townhouses on West 23rd Street, paid for by Dorothy Straight, hosted the school’s classrooms and administrative offices for 10 years. The school outgrew these spaces just as the buildings were slated for demolition to make room for the London Terrace Apartments in 1928. The school’s director, Alvin Johnson, also knew it was time to expand the space available to the students.

Johnson approached Daniel Crawford Smith, a benefactor and supporter of The New School, who owned three houses on West 12th Street just east of 6th Avenue in the heart of Greenwich Village. Smith agreed to support The New School’s efforts by donating the three lots, with the agreement that on the top floor would lay a penthouse apartment for himself and his wife. With the purchase of one more adjoining lot, this gave the university with eighty feet of frontage on West 12th Street. The building was the first to be constructed solely for use by the New School at a cost of about $1,000,000. (Note: accounting for inflation, the cost of building such a structure today would fall somewhere between approximately $14,020,898.20 – $15,404,539.47.)

Appropriate for a school dedicated to the “new,” the building on 66 West 12th street was the first building created in the International Style in New York City. Designed by Joseph Urban and completed in 1931, this building placed the New School on the map — as a center for modernism in the arts and experimentation in education. Urban was known for his training in Secessionist and modern design, as well as his work designing theaters. When Johnson and Urban met to discuss various aspects of the design, Johnson requested an egg-shaped auditorium. (The design was said to inspire that of Radio City Music Hall.) Based on Johnson’s experience as a lecturer, he thought that this design would provide more intimacy than a rectangular room and draw the audience together.

Towering above the surrounding brownstones, the white and black stone facade made a striking pattern. The strong horizontal bands leant the building a modernist feel in the machine-like functionality with no ornamentation. But what was most shocking was that the exterior mostly comprised of windows. Even the doors into the building were mostly panes of glass. Bronze horizontal bands cut across the doors, mimicking the building’s exterior brick pattern. The bands continued inside the lobby. Coupled with the inlaid lights and wall color, the lobby and entrance to the building resembled a theater more than a school. And the interior had far more ornamentation than the facade suggested. Through the many class windows of each floor you could see the vibrant colors that graced the building’s various spaces.

A wealth of information about the project to develop, design, build, and renovate 66 West 12th Street will be found in New School Architectural plans and drawings for 66 West Twelfth Street records and New School Publicity Office records.

For more photos, see here. For press clippings, see here.