Summer School

Mark McMenamin -- Interior Design, 11/1/2007 12:00:00 AM

The sleepy Catskills town of Margaretville, New York, is poised for revitalization. To kick-start it, residents invited 11 students from a workshop at Parsons the New School for Design, downstate, to spend the summer planning and building a park pavilion, a community centerpiece to replace a 50-year-old one damaged by a flooding Delaware River.

Led by faculty members such as Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis principal David Lewis, architecture and interior and lighting design students at the undergraduate and master's levels started by embedding steel columns 6 feet into concrete anchors to secure the 6,000-square-foot structure—the workshop's largest ever. (The previous year's project, an information center in Hurricane Katrina–ravaged DeLisle, Mississippi, won an AIA New York State Design Award.)

Next on the syllabus: Parsons plans to launch an interior design MFA program in 2009.