The new Stuyvesant building was constructed with the intention of embedding time in its structure. Mnemonics was designed to endow the school with a sense of its own history as well as a sense of the accumulated knowledge and multi-cultural history of the world. Over 400 glass cubes are scattered randomly throughout the entire building, from the main lobby to the tenth floor. Some of the cubes contain artifacts and relics that are evidence of geographical, natural, cultural, and social worlds, including water from the Nile River and a piece of the Great Wall of China. There are also individual glass cubes for each graduating class from 1904-2080, thus weaving Stuyvesant's past, present, and future. The 2003 graduating class chose a chunk of rubble from the first bombing of the World Trade Center, which was located near the school. Mnemonics won the Art Commission Award for Excellence in Design in 1989.
Mnemonics endows the new Stuyvesant High School with a sense of its own history
400 components
Each component is 8″ H x 8″ W x 4″ L
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
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.