The third-year studio course he offers in the BFA Interior Design Department links design and preservation. After the devastating hurricanes in the U.S. last year, Hylton and his students traveled to the hard-hit town of Bay St. Louis on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. Once there, they went to work inspecting a badly damaged 160-year-old timber-frame house that the WMF had agreed to help restore as part of a demonstration project, showing local residents that preservation was a viable alternative to bulldozing and starting anew.

Besides doing research to guide the restoration, the students came up with ways to integrate bathrooms and a new kitchen into the floor plan of the old house as well as design new cabinets, doors and fixtures to harmonize with the surviving interior woodwork and plaster. “Everything the students proposed had to be grounded in reality,” Hylton says. “The owner is a 75-year-old woman who rode out the hurricanes in the house, and she intends to move back in when the work is completed.”

Another project involved the creation of a museum and library inside the burned-out shell of a Shaker stone barn in New Lebanon, New York. Hylton’s students devised seven different plans that ranged from re-creating features of the original barn to highlighting the stone shell as an awe-inspiring ruin. A number of their ideas were incorporated into the final design. “What’s always exciting,” says Hylton, “is the challenge of integrating new design into the preservation of historic structures.”

DEPARTMENT HIGHLIGHTS
• • •	“Reinventing New York” senior thesis exhibition held at the National Arts Club, March 2006. Work by four students selected for April 2006 “New York Eleven” traveling exhibition in Albany and New York City. All four class years collaborate on “Seven Deadly Sins” Vertical Project.