Mnemonics 1992

The New Stuyvesant High School, Battery Park City, New York, NY

Commissioned by:
Battery Park City Authority in conjunction with The Percent for Art Program of the City of New York, Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York City Board of Education.

Dimensions:
400 components, each H 8" x W 8" x D 4" (H 20.3 x W 20.3 x D 10.1 cm) in public areas of a 400,000 square foot building

Materials:
Glass enclosures with stainless steel inserts and fasteners, each containing an array of materials hermetically sealed within and imbedded with mortar into the walls of the building

Note:
MNEMONICS won the Art Commission of the City of New York, Award for Excellence in Design.

Site Description:
The New Stuyvesant High School: the premiere science high school in Manhattan, a ten-story building constructed as a model school aimed at the future of education.

Project Description:

Four hundred hollow glass blocks are dispersed randomly from the basement to the tenth floor of the New Stuyvesant High School building. Each block contains relics that are evidence of geographical, natural, cultural and social worlds, from antiquity to the present time.

One group of blocks pertains to the history of Stuyvesant school. There is one block for each year, containing fragments of the school’s history and continuing culture. The primary group of blocks contain an encyclopedic range of materials from all over the world including fragments of the Mayan pyramids, leaves from the sacred Bo tree, and water from the Nile and Ganges Rivers. An additional 88 empty containers are provided, to be filled by each future class of Stuyvesant graduates up to the year 2080. Collectively, the 400+ blocks of Mnemonics suggest a visual library of the vast knowledge of humankind.

Mnemonics endows the new Stuyvesant High School with a sense of its own history, but more importantly for an institution of learning, a sense of the accumulated knowledge and multi-cultural history of the world.