The Michael Kalil Oral History Project consists of audio interviews with colleagues, collaborators, and friends of interior designer Michael Kalil (1943-1991). Jean Gardner, Karyn Issa Ginsberg, and Marty Speigel discuss Kalil's education, career, and ideas with project archivist Jennifer Larson. Kalil's work—incorporating diverse principles of architecture and philosophy—was considered by many to be revolutionary in the 1970s and 1980s.

Michael Kalil (1943-1991) was an interior architect, philosopher, educator and artist, known for his innovative work with new materials and for humanizing digital technologies. From 1981 to 1991, he was the principal of Kalil Designs/Kalil Studio, a firm that specialized in high-profile commercial, prototype and theoretical, and residential design commissions. Kalil also served as an adjunct faculty member at the Parsons School of Design.

The collection includes Kalil's personal and professional papers, including original artwork, sketchbooks, journals, photographs, project records, architectural drawings, photoprints and sketches, design prototypes, and posthumous materials.

This small record group documents two New York City-based projects taught by Parsons School of Design professor Jean McClintock Gardner in the early 1970s. One project focused on the Southern Boulevard Redemption Area in the Bronx, the other on Union Square in Manhattan. These projects involved original research and urban rehabilitation design proposals by students in the Environmental Design Department (now the School of Constructed Environments). Materials include a grant application, an audio recording, a press kit and publicity records, and student research in the form of data sets, interview summaries, design proposals, drafts and final reports, and maps.

The oral histories comprising this collection were conducted in 2010 in preparation for the exhibit, Radical Shifts: Reshaping the Interior at Parsons, 1955-1985, to record perspectives on the interior and environmental design departments at Parsons School of Design in the 1960s and 1970s. During this period, Parsons' interior design program adopted a more experimental program of study in the newly-created Environmental Design Department.