FIT’s new academic building was designed by SHoP Architects.
Photo by Christopher Payne/Courtesy
After 27 years of service to the Fashion Institute of Technology, Dr. Joyce F. Brown has left her mark and now there is a namesake building to prove it.
Brown, who announced last year that the 2024-25 academic year would be her finale as president, helped to cut the ribbon Thursday for the Joyce F. Brown Academic Building in New York. She will step down as president at the end of December.
Located on West 28th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, the 10-story building has more than 100,000 square feet and an eye-catching glass façade so that passersby can glimpse FIT in action. Its naming was green-lighted by a unanimous vote by FIT’s board of trustees.
The years-long project was funded by New York state, New York City, and individual and corporate supporters. The aim was to boost public higher education and further the next generation of talent for the fashion and creative industries. The building has 26 energy-efficient classrooms and studios, administrative offices, and the largest knitting lab on a campus in the U.S. The space also houses FIT’s first non-classroom interior space that is meant to connect students — a full-floor commons with 20-foot ceilings that is accessible via an express escalator. The building, which is working toward attaining LEED Gold certification, has been in the works for more than two decades.
In 2003, SHoP Architects was chosen from a field of 20 entrants in a competition hosted by FIT and funded by the National Endowment for the Arts with the aim of elevating the standards for public works nationwide. The New York-based SHoP Architects’ work can be seen at the Barclays Center, The Brooklyn Tower, Uber’s headquarters in San Francisco, YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, Calif. and the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok. In 2009, the firm won the National Design Award for Architecture Design from the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum.
The goal was always to create “an important place of learning” for FIT’s students and faculty, Brown said in an interview Thursday.
“It’s been a long time coming. We now have all the things that we didn’t have before — a common area for students to congregate and to come together, and incredible studios,” she said.
Abiding by the ethos that “when you expect a lot from people, you need to invest in them and the environment that they work in,” Brown said the building does just that and is “an investment in the future.”
Pointing out how SHoP Architects is known for being current and innovative, Brown said: “We’ve all aged a little together over the years. But they certainly came to us with new ideas and were very committed to having a consistency in the architecture. They did an incredible job.”
The end result required coordinating the architecture’s design, materials and colors with the existing Brutalist-era buildings, Brown said. Established in 1944 as a college for design, art, communication and technology, FIT’s footprint on the city includes multiple buildings from 26th to 28th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. In 1967, when FIT hired De Young & Moscowitz to design the buildings that anchor the new campus, the architecture critic Paul Goldberger described the design as “a tailored version of Corbusier-inspired Brutalism.”
“I’m very proud of it,” Brown said. “I have to say it is not simply my accomplishment. It was such a team effort with so many people involved,” she said. “I was the coach. I always believed. There were many, many obstacles, challenges, and people, who said, ‘No.’ But I always think, ‘Somebody else will say yes.’”
Despite the naysayers, Brown never thought the team would fail. “It is a sheer force of will sometimes” that is needed, she said. “It is an amazing symbol of a legacy. But it wasn’t my goal to have my name on a building.”
More than anything the building was meant to be a sign of FIT “putting our money where our mouth is,” in terms of being a vital part of the energy and dynamism of New York, and investing in that for the city and the State University of New York, which FIT is part of. Now we have a symbol that recognizes the value of all of that. People can see what we invested in and understood the importance of that in New York City and in the State University of New York,” she said.
As for all of the lives that were touched along the way at FIT, she said, “You don’t always get the beams of good work and achievements that are out there that we had a hand in. The students are the most transient part of the place. Faculty come and they stay. They live with us in the growing community. Many students lived through me promising them there was going to be a building, and then they moved on in life and are doing great things,” Brown said.
In turn, FIT is trying to enhance its outreach to alumni “to make sure that they are part of this great achievement,” Brown said. “Maybe with the beautiful outer visage they will come back in time.”
The exterior of the namesake building.
Photo Courtesy FIT
Looking back, Brown never thought of giving up on the building, and compared herself to “the bull in the arena — I would see red. There were too many good reasons for it to happen. But small-minded individuals, who happened to be blocking our path at any point in time, my goal was to get around them. I would answer their questions in a legitimate way. Then they would just come up with something else. That’s what fueled my focus and commitment. I wasn’t going to take no [for an answer].”
More than anything, Brown said the building signals that New York City and New York state understand the importance of a strong university and the creative industries that fuel the economy in New York. “And we are the engine that drives it,” Brown said. “The building is a great symbol. I’m very proud of our role in the dynamism of New York City and in the economy. This environment will help us to fuel even more generations.”