Located in the entrance lobby of Stuyvesant High School, Tabula consists of thirty panels of differently colored and stratified pieces of etched marble. The panels are etched with drawings that refer to systems of knowledge, including botany, astronomy, mathematics, language, and exploration. The marble used comes from quarries in Brazil, India, Spain, Africa, Italy, and the United States, creating a "dialogue of matter." Said Stuart, "Tabula is about quest."

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.

Stuyvesant High School was founded in 1904 as a manual training school for boys, and is one of the most extremely competitive public high schools in New York City. Every year about 20,000 students are tested and 800 accepted. Famous alumni and faculty include: Four Nobel laureates, winners of the Fields Medal and the Wolf Prize are graduates as are Tim Robbins, Lucy Liu, James Cagney, Eric Holder. Frank McCourt taught English there before he published Angela's Ashes.