Situated on the top floor of Parsons’ Greenwich Village campus complex, the new 8,000sf School of Constructed Environments Hub eliminates the near total compartmentalization that characterized the floor’s original condition, revealing for the first time the privileged space’s cinematic, near 360-degree views of Lower Manhattan. Opening-up the top floor’s 375lf windowed perimeter stems from a simple design precept: no new walls may intersect it. A continuum of new daylit spaces are organized around a series of dark, striated meeting volumes of varying scale, loosely distributed across the L-shaped floor plate. These new meeting-box island-organizers define open design studios, faculty hot seat zone, dean’s zone, coffee commune and administrative programs in a way that connects them visually even as they provide a sense of place for each academic group. (Rice+Lipka)