The board of trustees of the New School approved plans yesterday for a 16-story, mixed-use building to replace its existing low-rise building on Fifth Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets that used to be a Lerner's store.

The new building will have a 7-story base that will house some retail and a University Center and a 9-story setback tower that will have a 600-unit dormitory for its students.

The $353 million project requires no public approvals.

The planned building has been designed by Roger Duffy of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill who designed the Toren residential condominium tower in downtown Brooklyn that is nearing completion and it resembles that building a bit in its unusual and asymmetric fenestration.

The school building will be clad in bands of brass with "blisters" of white windows that highlight some of the building's staircases.

An earlier design for the project indicated a white, red and blue facade.

In an article in today's edition of The New York Times by Charles V. Bagli, Bob Kerry, the school's president said "It's going to be the center of the university, a favorite gathering place for students and faculty," adding that "This institution is in the midst of a transformation, amplifying its urban campus to serve degree-seeking students who now make up the majority of our enrollment."

Construction is expected to begin in August and be completed in 2013.

The original proposal was larger, taller and "a little too office-buildingish for the neighborhood," Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, told The Times, adding that "This plan has come a long way since the original 350-foot-tall design with an all-glass exterior and projecting multicolored lights."

Mr. Berman's organization has had long disputes with another Greenwich Village educational institution, New York University, over its large expansion plans.

Academic architecture in New York City has not been distinguished in recent decades except for the recently completed academic center designed by Morphosis for Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art across the street from McSorley's, the famous pub.

In his accompanying review, Nicolai Ouroussoff, the architectural critic of The New York Times, noted that the planned building "is not shy," adding that the "thick glass band, tracing an elaborate double-decker internal staircase, carve diagonally across its facade like a chunky costume-jewelry necklace."

"What enlivens the design, however, is not its bling," the review continued, "but its emphasis on the spectacle of social interaction. The interior, it turns out, is packed with communal spaces meant to encourage casual interactions. The exposed staircases are intended to put the flow of movement through the building on display to the world. They embody the idea - a popular one in architecture today - that getting an education should not be about barricading yourself inside a monastery but participating fully in public life."

"The building's brass skin will be made of thin horizontal bands - essentially a blown-up version of conventional clapboard siding - giving it a taut and somewhat aloof appearance....The glass-walled staircases, which look as if they have been gouged into the facade with a gigantic router, are an assertive counterpoint to the standoffishness, an effort to create a strong visual bond with the neighborhood - the illusion that the flow of bodies along the street is being sucked right up through the building," the article continued.

The building is across East 13th Street from a former Schrafft's building that for many years had a wonderful, giant sculpture of an iguana on its roof that enlivened the very elegant precincts of Lower Fifth Avenue.